Sexual Abuse: Online Harms – Nexus’ Webinar Series Recap
To mark this year’s Sexual Abuse & Sexual Violence Awareness Week, we hosted a five-day long series of lunchtime webinars on the theme of ‘Online Harms & Sexual Abuse’. Each day a different presenter brought their own knowledge and expertise, delivering to approximately 460 participants across the week.
Participants came from an array of professional backgrounds including education, policing, youth work, local government, public prosecutions, healthcare, counselling, media, and community support organisations.
Key learnings:
1. Younger people are using Generative Artificial Intelligence technology much more than adults (79% 13-17 year olds compared to 31% of adults).
2. Artificial Intelligence (AI) mobile applications are consistently topping the app download charts, indicating high levels of usage.
3. In the UK, males aged 16+ are more likely to have used a Generative AI tool than females aged 16+ (half compared to a third).
4. Generative AI models can create child sexual abuse material (CSAM) based on data used to train them and the instructions given by the user.
5. AI apps are already being used to target minors in sextortion scams, and sextortion ‘training’ materials (i.e. used to train AI) have been found on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube.
Key learnings:
1. 34% of children aged 5-15 years have seen nude or nearly nude images online.
2. The incel movement isolates young men in particular, and this lack of peer support and peer pressure to conform to the incel culture can contribute to these young men becoming perpetrators of violence.
3. Some young people see sharing nude images of themselves as a way of being romantic, whereas others feel pressure from peers to share these self-generated images to fit in or avoid being called out.
4. Professionals with a safeguarding capacity should allow room for discussion with young people and offer solutions to help young people if they are struggling.
5. Talking about respect in every setting and using exercises to teach respect can help young people have healthier relationships online and offline.
Key learnings:
1. Young people today are getting their news and information from social media sites and the influencers who inhabit them.
2. There has been a surge in online misogyny in recent years, which many see as a counter-reaction to decades of progress in gender equality.
3. Young people recognise the real-life impact of online misogyny, seeing it presented in schools and workplaces often brushed off as a joke.
4. Social media influencers can encourage positive or negative behaviours and views, it depends on their message. One risk with these influencers is that their information is often not fact-checked, which leaves followers at risk of being exposed to false or misleading information.
5. Disinformation is a deliberate lie, whereas misinformation is incorrect information that the person sharing believes to be true.
Key learnings:
1. As of May 2024, Northern Ireland had the highest number of online pornography users in the UK and as of 2023, the average age at which children first see pornography is 13 – by age 9, 10% have seen it, and by age 11, 27% have seen it.
2. In one study, 75% of parents thought their children had not viewed pornography, however 53% of the children in the same study had viewed pornography, demonstrating the gap between parental expectations and beliefs vs reality.
3. Young people access porn for a range of reasons, including: curiosity about sex, want for information on how to have sex, for masturbation, because it’s normalised, through boredom, accidentally, or they’ve been shown it by others.
4. Pornography can have negative societal impacts, including creating: a focus on performance over pleasure, psychosexual issues, polarised and unrealistic norms of masculinity and femininity, perpetuation of rape myths, and promotion of harmful sexual behaviour/normalising violence and aggression.
5. The main message from the experts was to teach our young people about consent from an early age (around what food they like for example) and continue that dialogue as they grow so they feel safe to come to you with the big things.
Key learnings:
1. There is an Online Safety Hub available to contact Mon-Fri 10am-4pm which supports professionals working with children and young people with any online safety issues – view here. Additionally, Report Harmful Content is a national reporting centre designed to assist everyone to report harmful content online – view here.
2. ‘Revenge Porn’ is now referred to as ‘Intimate Image Abuse’, ‘Non-Consensual Intimate Images’, or ‘Image-Based Sexual Abuse’ and can include sharing or taking of images/videos without consent, threats to share, and sextortion (blackmail). A ‘Deepfake’ is an image or video of a person digitally altered so that they appear to be someone else, typically used maliciously or to spread false information – this is a term coined by a perpetrator and therefore not used by The Revenge Porn Helpline.
3. Intimate image abuse is a gendered issue: 28 times more images of women are shared than of men; in 95% of their cases that require content to be reported the clients are women; 73% of threats to share affect women. However, 93% of their sextortion cases affected men.
4. The laws in NI that cover intimate image abuse are the Justice Act (Northern Ireland) 2016 and The Sexual Offences Act (Northern Ireland) 2008. The former covers sharing intimate images without consent and threatening to share intimate images with the intent to cause distress, fear, or alarm. The latter solely covers voyeurism.
5. The COVID-19 Pandemic led to a large increase in intimate image abuse in the UK, likely due to the fact our lives became much more digital and online focused from then onwards.
Key learnings:
1. Younger people are using Generative Artificial Intelligence technology much more than adults (79% 13-17 year olds compared to 31% of adults).
2. Artificial Intelligence (AI) mobile applications are consistently topping the app download charts, indicating high levels of usage.
3. In the UK, males aged 16+ are more likely to have used a Generative AI tool than females aged 16+ (half compared to a third).
4. Generative AI models can create child sexual abuse material (CSAM) based on data used to train them and the instructions given by the user.
5. AI apps are already being used to target minors in sextortion scams, and sextortion ‘training’ materials (i.e. used to train AI) have been found on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube.
Key learnings:
1. 34% of children aged 5-15 years have seen nude or nearly nude images online.
2. The incel movement isolates young men in particular, and this lack of peer support and peer pressure to conform to the incel culture can contribute to these young men becoming perpetrators of violence.
3. Some young people see sharing nude images of themselves as a way of being romantic, whereas others feel pressure from peers to share these self-generated images to fit in or avoid being called out.
4. Professionals with a safeguarding capacity should allow room for discussion with young people and offer solutions to help young people if they are struggling.
5. Talking about respect in every setting and using exercises to teach respect can help young people have healthier relationships online and offline.
Key learnings:
1. Young people today are getting their news and information from social media sites and the influencers who inhabit them.
2. There has been a surge in online misogyny in recent years, which many see as a counter-reaction to decades of progress in gender equality.
3. Young people recognise the real-life impact of online misogyny, seeing it presented in schools and workplaces often brushed off as a joke.
4. Social media influencers can encourage positive or negative behaviours and views, it depends on their message. One risk with these influencers is that their information is often not fact-checked, which leaves followers at risk of being exposed to false or misleading information.
5. Disinformation is a deliberate lie, whereas misinformation is incorrect information that the person sharing believes to be true.
Key learnings:
1. As of May 2024, Northern Ireland had the highest number of online pornography users in the UK and as of 2023, the average age at which children first see pornography is 13 – by age 9, 10% have seen it, and by age 11, 27% have seen it.
2. In one study, 75% of parents thought their children had not viewed pornography, however 53% of the children in the same study had viewed pornography, demonstrating the gap between parental expectations and beliefs vs reality.
3. Young people access porn for a range of reasons, including: curiosity about sex, want for information on how to have sex, for masturbation, because it’s normalised, through boredom, accidentally, or they’ve been shown it by others.
4. Pornography can have negative societal impacts, including creating: a focus on performance over pleasure, psychosexual issues, polarised and unrealistic norms of masculinity and femininity, perpetuation of rape myths, and promotion of harmful sexual behaviour/normalising violence and aggression.
5. The main message from the experts was to teach our young people about consent from an early age (around what food they like for example) and continue that dialogue as they grow so they feel safe to come to you with the big things.
Key learnings:
1. There is an Online Safety Hub available to contact Mon-Fri 10am-4pm which supports professionals working with children and young people with any online safety issues – view here. Additionally, Report Harmful Content is a national reporting centre designed to assist everyone to report harmful content online – view here.
2. ‘Revenge Porn’ is now referred to as ‘Intimate Image Abuse’, ‘Non-Consensual Intimate Images’, or ‘Image-Based Sexual Abuse’ and can include sharing or taking of images/videos without consent, threats to share, and sextortion (blackmail). A ‘Deepfake’ is an image or video of a person digitally altered so that they appear to be someone else, typically used maliciously or to spread false information – this is a term coined by a perpetrator and therefore not used by The Revenge Porn Helpline.
3. Intimate image abuse is a gendered issue: 28 times more images of women are shared than of men; in 95% of their cases that require content to be reported the clients are women; 73% of threats to share affect women. However, 93% of their sextortion cases affected men.
4. The laws in NI that cover intimate image abuse are the Justice Act (Northern Ireland) 2016 and The Sexual Offences Act (Northern Ireland) 2008. The former covers sharing intimate images without consent and threatening to share intimate images with the intent to cause distress, fear, or alarm. The latter solely covers voyeurism.
5. The COVID-19 Pandemic led to a large increase in intimate image abuse in the UK, likely due to the fact our lives became much more digital and online focused from then onwards.
